Entrepreneurial Geekiness

I’m getting lots more spam on my work account, apparently due to the storm botnet. Now I drag 10-20 new mails to the spam_to_learn folder every day and I check and delete 50-100 identified spams each day.

Of the incoming spams – a small but steady percentage are in a foreign language. They use unicode, I guess it is Chinese, Japanese or Korean. The thing is – I can’t read these mails! I’ve never been able to read far-Eastern languages. Couldn’t my spam filter flag these as ‘questionable’ automatically?

Come to think of it – I can’t read many of the world’s languages. I can read a bit of French, but I’d be stumped by anything from Africa or South America. How come my mail reader can’t filter these away – a dictionary lookup can’t be that hard, surely?

The biggie of course is the amount of spam I receive from people I don’t know. I’ve never seen these email addresses before, it is likely that I never will again. Anyone that I talk to frequently on the web won’t know these people either.

What about if our email clients spoke (hashed and encrypted) to the address books of authorised friends and asked them ‘do you know this person?‘.

If the answer is yes then this new email address is probably something to do with my social network. This can be flagged for my attention – useful!

If the answer is ‘no’ then either they’re a foreign person entirely (and probably spam) or they’re from outside my long-developed social network. Either way they can be flagged as ‘unknown’ and filtered to a separate folder.

A chance to avoid deleting emails from people I might actually know is a Good Thing in my book. I nearly did it to an important email just a few days ago, I’d dragged the mail all the way to the spam_to_learn folder before I’d realised that the ‘financial questions’ title, name and ‘attachment’ were signs of a Really Important Mail from someone new (but known to a friend) and not the usual spam that I receive.

Can someone come up with a plug-in for Thunderbird?

Thank-goodness. I feel lighter and my world seems brighter. I have quit Facebook.

First I had to turn off all the damned annoying notification emails. Did I want to be Poked, Pro-poked, zombied and pirated? No, of course not. Nor did I want the endless Questions and Group Invites.

And what’s with people Friending you who have never met you? Now I have confirmed that everyone I know in Real Life is also in Facebook and…what’s the point any more?

Now they can track my dead profile, good luck to ’em. The downside? They know the email addresses of all my on-line friends (which is to say – most of them), how often I talk to them, how active we are, what topics my friends like, photos of us with accompanying meta-data and the tone of how we speak to each other (from in-site emails). Aside from that little privacy nightmare, I guess nothing’s wrong. Ho hum.